Add Workers With Limits: Delegate the Counter, Keep the Books

There is a stage every growing business hits: the day you cannot be behind the counter anymore. Maybe the second shop opened. Maybe you finally took a Sunday off. Whatever the trigger, the moment you hand the counter to someone else, a new fear moves in: what exactly can they see, and what exactly can they touch?

The Pain: All or Nothing Access

The traditional options are both terrible. Option one: give the worker nothing. They sell all day, write scraps on paper, and every evening you re-enter their day into your records, which means you are still doing the bookkeeping for a shop you supposedly delegated. Option two: give the worker everything. Hand them your phone, your app, your full records, and hope. Now your cashier knows your exact profit margin, which has a strange way of becoming the neighbourhood's information. Worse, a worker who can delete records can make a ₦20,000 sale disappear as easily as recording it.

Funke owns two provision shops in Lagos and lived this exact dilemma. Her Ojota shop girl was honest but Funke still flinched at her seeing margins. Her Ketu shop had a different problem: a previous worker had "corrected" the records whenever the drawer came up short. Funke needed a middle road: workers who can do their job fully and only their job.

What Gazeloft Workers and Permissions Are

Gazeloft lets you invite staff with role-based permissions scoped per space. The key ideas:

• Roles that match real shops. Cashier, stock keeper, manager, admin, or a custom role you shape yourself. A cashier can record sales without seeing profit and without deleting records. A stock keeper handles inventory. A manager sees more, an admin more still. You choose.
• Scoped per space. A worker logs into only their assigned space. Your Ojota girl sees Ojota, never Ketu, never your POS space, never your personal wallet.
• Per-worker cash accountability. When you as owner add funds, the Add Fund can be tagged to a specific worker, and each worker sees their own cash boxes. Evening reconciliation becomes "your box says ₦34,000, count it", per person, not one blurred pool of blame.
• Plan limits. Plus (₦1,500 per month) allows 5 workers per space across 5 spaces. Business (₦5,000 per month) allows unlimited workers and spaces.

The philosophy is simple: trust is good, structure is better, and the kindest thing you can do for an honest worker is a system where suspicion cannot land on them.

How to Set It Up

In the app:

1. Open the space the worker will operate in.
2. Go to the workers or team section and invite the worker.
3. Pick their role: cashier, stock keeper, manager, admin, or build a custom role by choosing exactly which permissions they get.
4. The worker logs in with their own credentials and lands only in their assigned space, seeing only what their role allows.
5. When you add cash for the day, tag the Add Fund to that worker so it lands in their cash box.

On the web dashboard:

1. At gazeloft.com, open the space and manage the team from there, same roles, same scoping.
2. Workers can also use the web dashboard for their space, useful for a manager on a laptop at the back office.
3. As owner, review per-worker cash from the dashboard when reconciling the day.

Worked Example: Funke's Two Shops

Funke sets up two retail spaces, Ojota and Ketu, on the Plus plan. She invites:

• Bisi, cashier at Ojota. Bisi can record sales and expenses. She cannot see profit figures and cannot delete anything.
• Sola, cashier at Ketu, same role.
• Her cousin Deji, manager at Ketu, who also receives stock.

Monday morning Funke adds a ₦20,000 cash float, tagged to Bisi, and ₦20,000 tagged to Sola. Each sees her own cash box.

Through the day, Bisi records 74 sales totalling ₦186,500 at Ojota. Sola records 58 sales totalling ₦142,000 at Ketu. Funke, at home, watches both spaces live on the web dashboard without a single phone call.

At closing, Bisi's cash box should hold the float plus cash sales minus cash expenses: ₦20,000 plus ₦121,300 cash sales minus ₦3,500 she spent on nylon bags equals ₦137,800. The physical count says ₦137,800. Clean day, and Bisi can prove it, which she loves, because in her last job every shortage in a shared drawer was somehow her fault.

At Ketu the count comes up ₦2,000 short. But because records cannot be silently deleted, Funke scrolls the day's entries and finds the likely culprit in two minutes: a ₦2,000 sale recorded as transfer that the customer actually paid in cash. Sola remembers the customer. Mystery solved without accusation, record corrected honestly through a reversal and re-entry.

Meanwhile, neither Bisi nor Sola has ever seen that Funke's margin on provisions is around 22 percent, and neither can see the other shop exists.

Three months in, the numbers tell the bigger story. Funke visits each shop twice a week instead of daily, her evenings are her own, and shrinkage across both shops has fallen from roughly ₦15,000 a month of unexplained gaps to under ₦3,000, almost all of it traceable to honest recording slips rather than mysteries. Delegation did not cost her control; the permissions gave her more control than standing at the counter ever did.

Tips and Pitfalls

• Start narrow, widen with trust. It is easy to grant a permission later and awkward to remove one. Begin every new worker as a cashier-level role.
• Never share your owner login. The entire protection model rests on each person acting under their own identity. Shared logins turn your audit trail into a rumour.
• Tag floats to workers. Untagged cash goes to a general pool. Tagged cash gives every worker their own box and every shortage a clear address.
• Use custom roles for in-between people. A senior sales girl who also receives stock does not need manager powers. Compose exactly the permission set she needs.
• Tell workers what the system sees. Not as a threat, as a comfort. Honest staff relax when they learn the records defend them as much as they defend you.

Delegate Without Losing the Loft

You built the farm; you should not have to guard every row of it personally. Give each worker exactly the gate key their job needs, watch the whole field from the loft, and take your Sunday back. Set up your team today at gazeloft.com.